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KIRKUS REVIEW

In 1922, at a meeting of
the French Society of Philosophy, Henri Bergson (1859-1941), “one of the most
respected philosophers of his era,” expressed unhappiness with Albert
Einstein’s theory of relativity, which discarded the concept of absolute time
and denied the reality of simultaneity. Present in the audience, Einstein
disagreed.

One consequence was that
the Nobel committee changed its mind, awarding Einstein the 1922 prize for
explaining the photoelectric effect on the grounds that relativity was still a
matter of debate. Both reaffirmed their disagreement over the years, a matter
that scholars have not considered of great importance. In this lucid if
academic history of scientists’ efforts to measure time and the consequences of
their success, Canales (Chair, History of Science/Univ. of Illinois; A
Tenth of a Second: A History, 2010, etc.) makes a reasonable case that
those scholars were wrong. Einstein did not invent the relativity of time and
space, but his 1905 special theory proposed such a revolutionary view of the
universe that even those who did (Henri Poincaré, Hendrik Lorentz) balked.
Bergson, a brilliant thinker whose writing emphasizes intuition and perception,
was also not convinced, “claiming that the sensational conclusions of the
physicist’s theory were not so unlike the fantastical searches for the fountain
of youth.” Canales dismisses the argument that Bergson, a polymath, didn’t
understand the theory of relativity. He and his supporters’ objections stemmed
from a “strong repugnance toward a philosophy that wants to explain all reality
mechanically.” The author turns up a surprising number of philosophers and
scientists who weighed in on an ongoing, if not world-shaking, debate that
split the century “into two cultures pitting scientists against humanists,
expert knowledge against lay wisdom.”

A dense but accessible
discussion of the metaphysical role of time in human affairs.

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